Ruby on Rails: Speed Demon Edition - 5x Faster Schema Loading
Today we're celebrating a massive performance win from andrewn617 at Shopify who just made Rails schema loading 5 times faster by batching SQL statements during table creation. Plus, Saidbek cleaned up some unused code in ActiveSupport's JSON decoding module, keeping our codebase tidy.
Duration: PT3M53S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Ruby on Rails.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Ruby on Rails
- Published: 2026-03-19T10:10:31Z
- Audio duration: PT3M53S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, Rails developers! Welcome back to another episode of Ruby on Rails - your daily dose of what's happening in the framework we all love. I'm your host, and wow, do we have some exciting stuff to talk about today, March 19th, 2026.
You know that feeling when you're working on a big Rails app and you run your tests or boot up your development server, and you're just sitting there... waiting... for the schema to load? Well, grab your coffee because today's main story is going to make you very, very happy.
Let's dive right into the star of today's show - pull request 57000 from andrewn617 over at Shopify. This is one of those contributions that makes me genuinely excited about our community. Here's the story: they're working with a PostgreSQL database that has over a thousand tables. I know, I know - that sounds…
Now here's the kicker - their schema was taking 120 seconds to load. Two full minutes! That's enough time to make a sandwich, check your messages, maybe question some life choices. But andrewn617 wasn't having it. They dug into the problem and discovered that Rails was executing SQL statements one by one when…
So what did they do? They implemented SQL statement…
This…
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